The invention concerns structures for protection of a sleeper in a bed against serious injury or death which may be caused by the effects of damage to the surrounding residential structure during an earthquake.
Since people spend roughly a third of their lives sleeping, and since severe earthquakes may occur at any time and without any reliable prior warning, there is a need for means to protect a sleeping person against the serious injury or death which may be caused by partial or total collapse of the surrounding residence in which the sleeper's bed is located.
Though many means have been devised for strengthening an entire residential structure against earthquake damage, a bed is a much smaller structure. So it is possible to achieve a higher degree of protection for a sleeper through a protective structure which only surrounds the bed, than may be economically feasible for the entire residence structure, at least for many people of medium or moderate economic means. This is particularly so for persons living in older residences offering inadequate earthquake protection, which may be extremely expensive to retrofit with more adequate structural protective means, for the entire residence. In this connection, an earthquake resistant structure surrounding a bed can not only offer protection for its owner when an earthquake occurs during sleep, but can also provide a ready shelter for the owner to enter even when awake, if there is not sufficient time to exit the building after onset of an earthquake occurring during waking hours.
There are two main kinds of protection which an earthquake resistant bed structure needs to offer, for protection of a sleeper within the structure. First, the protective structure must offer protection against the very large mechanical shocks which may be caused if large pieces of the residential structure fall upon the bed, by redistributing the crash forces in several directions, to dissipate the shock, so as to reduce the likelihood of serious blunt force trauma injury or death for the sleeper.
Second, the protective structure must also offer protection against ballistic penetration of the bed structure by smaller fragments of the residence structure, which fragments may be moving at high velocities, due to the large energy release involved in serious earthquake damage of the residential structure. A single high velocity small structural fragment could cause serious injury or death of the sleeper, even if the protective structure adequately dealt with the large mechanical shocks caused by impact of larger structural debris pieces.
Although prior earthquake bed patents, attached to applicant's Information Disclosure Statement, have disclosed a variety of specific features addressed to providing both of these forms of protection, as detailed in the Information Disclosure Statement, it is the intent of the present invention to provide advantageous combinations of features not afforded or suggested by the prior patents, including certain particular features not disclosed at all in the prior patents, as detailed below and in applicant's Information Disclosure Statement.